


Mirror Image

by plutosrose



Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [15]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, M/M, Past non-consensual body modification, Soulmarks, medical study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:54:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29141817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: Steve joins a medical study after he tells Dr. Cho his soulmark changed, and meets Bucky Barnes, who had his soulmark removed by Hydra.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1830826
Comments: 10
Kudos: 161
Collections: Stucky Bingo 2020





	Mirror Image

Between being not-dead and needing to go and save the world almost immediately after becoming not-dead hadn’t exactly left Steve with a lot of time on his hands. Sure, after the dust had cleared, he’d been able to do a few things, like finally go to the Met, see his parents’ resting place, and rent a place in Brooklyn for himself, a few blocks away from where he’d grown up. 

Figuring out why his soulmark had changed ranked pretty low on the list. He had initially figured that maybe it was just something that happened in the future, like climate change or online shopping. 

That was, until he mentioned it to Natasha over lunch one day. Back when he was growing up, it wasn’t really the kind of thing anyone talked about, especially since soulmarks had never cared about gender when society very much did. But the fact that it had changed was weird, and he’d mentioned it off hand, expecting Natasha to roll her eyes or tell him that he was overreacting.

Instead, Natasha had furrowed her brow and said, “You should probably go see Cho about that.” 

The fact that his soulmark had changed wasn’t even the worst part. It was now a star that looked just like the one that Howard had painted onto his shield during the war. It wasn’t even on his shoulder anymore. It was on his chest. Like even when he took the suit off and was just Steve Rogers he wasn’t allowed to be just Steve Rogers. 

It had to be some sort of cosmic joke. If heaven existed, Howard was out there right now, right at that very moment, laughing himself stupid. 

\--

Dr. Cho had put him through a battery of medical tests, measuring his heart rate, his blood pressure, his weight, his lung capacity, before she sat down opposite him in the examining room. It was a relief when she finished, because his entire body was thrumming with anxiety and annoyance, wondering if Dr. Cho was just interested in verifying the effects of the serum and Dr. Erksine’s research. 

“So, your soulmark changed?” she asked, typing something into a tablet. 

“It was different,” Steve nodded, “before I went down in the Valkyrie. It kind of looked like vines?”

Thinking back to the mark that used to be on his shoulder made him feel a wave of desperate sadness wash over him. The mark was just like Peggy’s, and for a while during the war, he had entertained the idea that they might get married after it was over. 

Well, it was over alright. 

Cho looked up at him and furrowed her brow. “You have no recollection of it changing?”

“Well, it probably appeared like two weeks or so after I woke up?” Steve said, furrowing his brow. “Before that, though, I didn’t have one anymore. Tony made a lot of jokes about me being like a Ken doll.” His mouth twisted unpleasantly. Cho’s face remained neutral. 

She reached out for his arm and examined the mark with her magnifying glass. “It’s unusual for marks to change. Usually there’s a reason. Death, for example, is a common one..” 

“But Peggy isn’t dead. Did hers change too?”

“Hmm, Margaret Carter,” Cho mused to herself, taking a step away from Steve to type something into her tablet. “Ah, here we go. She submitted pictures of her soulmark for analysis when it changed in 1947. That was about the time that you were officially declared dead.”

Cho flipped the tablet around and showed Steve the photo of what was Peggy’s ankle. Back during the war, it had the same vines as his shoulder, but the mark now almost looked like a heart. 

It was simultaneously a relief and upsetting to know that Peggy’s mark had changed too. 

Cho sat back on her stool. “I don’t know if you would potentially be interested in joining a study on soulmarks, Captain? Soulmarks are starting to change more frequently now, and it’s important that we get better data on this to understand why.” 

“Is that something…” Steve hesitated for a moment, pursing his lips. After the Chitauri, more than a couple of photos had been taken of him when he was just walking around Manhattan, not to mention the pictures last week taken outside his apartment. It was beginning to get more than a little irritating. “Is that something that would get reported in the press?”

Cho shook her head. “No, it’s all confidential and anonymous.” She wheeled the stool over to the counter and opened a drawer, pulling out a business card to hand to him. “It’s mostly to just get a catalogue of how and when your mark changed, as well as any accompanying changes in physiology.”

Steve nodded as he took the card. 

“And maybe you’ll even meet your soulmate while you’re there,” Cho added, smiling faintly.

Steve shrugged. “Don’t exactly have the best track record, Doctor.” 

\----

The business card from Dr. Cho sat in the bottom of his nightstand for an entire week, burning a hole through whatever overly expensive wood that it was made of. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t have a lot of questions. He did. But there was more to it than that--when he’d become convinced that he was actually alive in the future and not just having a very elaborate hallucination, he’d become a celebrity, and although Cho had assured him that the information wouldn’t be leaked to the press, once he thought about it, he realized there was no way for her to control who saw him with the business card or who saw him show up on the day of the study.

And yet, the more he looked at it, the more he turned the card over in his hands, the more curious he became.

He’d woken up alone in the future, without a world that he recognized. Maybe it was selfish, but the idea that his soulmate could still be out there quickly wormed its way into his head.

He had to find them. 

-

He called the number on the business card that Cho had given him and was confirmed for a slot on the following Tuesday as well as assigned an identification number that the woman on the other end of the line assured him after he asked three times was meant to keep the entire process confidential.

Before he left for the appointment, he made sure to pull on a baseball cap and a hoodie, hoping to look as inconspicuous as possible (although Natasha had picked apart how bad this disguise was on no less than three occasions). But he didn’t mess with things that worked. People didn’t tend to notice him as long as he wasn’t making eye contact, at least.

Well, he thought, thinking back to some of the more recent photographs that had been taken of him outside of the gym across the street from his Brooklyn apartment. Most of the time they didn’t.

Mercifully, the study wasn’t being conducted in Stark Tower. He wasn’t sure that he could have handled seeing Natasha or Clint or (definitely not) Tony. It was at a local hospital in Manhattan, with plenty of people coming in and out and paying absolutely no attention to him. He had to fight back a grin as he navigated his way to the office. 

When he reached the office, he was glad to see that he didn’t have to sign his name anywhere. Once he told the receptionist that he was there for the study and gave her the number he’d been assigned over the phone, she handed him back a stack of forms. 

As long as the forms were (did people in the future have some kind of weird fascination with paperwork? He was pretty certain that he’d filled out fewer forms in all of his attempts to join the army _combined_ ), it didn’t take him long to sign everything and hand it back to the receptionist. He looked at the clock and bit his lip. He should have brought a book with him or something. He still had close to an hour before his appointment was due to start.

He settled into a chair in the waiting room, keeping a healthy distance from most of the other people there. For the most part, everyone seemed to be minding their own business--looking down at phones or reading magazines. He sank into the chair when he noticed that one person was reading a magazine with him on the cover and looked away as quickly as he could.

As it happened, his gaze landed on the man that had just entered the waiting room. 

The man was gorgeous, and Steve immediately felt guilty for staring as long as he had. But, just as he was trying to force himself to look away, his eyes landed on the metal arm...and the star on his upper arm.

Steve’s eyes widened.

The star looked just like the one that was on his chest. And while he could almost hear Natasha in the back of his head saying, ‘a lot of stars look very similar to each other,’ he knew what his mark looked like. He would recognize its mirror image anywhere. He knew that for a fact deep down in the pit of his very soul.

Okay, maybe Peggy had had a bit of a point when she’d accused him of being dramatic. 

The man was looking back at him. 

Shit. Okay.

He forced himself to look away and lowered his cap a little further. It did occur to him that he was possibly making himself stand out more by a) fidgeting and b) wearing a baseball cap that obscured most of his face indoors, but it was a price he was willing to pay. Who knew the future would be interested in him, Steven Grant Rogers? 

When he looked up again, because as it turned out, he apparently really couldn’t help himself, the man was gone, and someone was settling into the seat next to him. 

“If you’re going to stare at me we might as well talk to each other,” the man chuckled from the seat next to him. Steve shrank down into his seat and prayed to God that the serum included some kind of invisibility powers that he didn’t know about. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve murmured. His brain was scrambling to craft a more thorough, honest apology, but it didn’t seem to have caught up with his mouth. “I guess I’m not used to all of this.”

“All of what?”

He snuck a glance at the man, and yeah, okay, he was even more gorgeous up close as opposed to twenty feet away. Steve wasn’t having a crisis at all.

“I haven’t really been able to go anywhere since I uh...got back..” he trailed off, wondering if there was a way for him to carefully explain that he’d been away for ‘a very long time’ and have it sound like he’d just been out of the country a while and not kind of dead for seventy years.

The man reached out and put his hand on his arm in what was probably meant to be a comforting gesture, but it made Steve feel warm all over and like he was about to vibrate out of his skin. “I watch the news, I know it’s you, Steve.”

Now that was interesting. 

No one, aside from some of his teammates, like Natasha and occasionally Clint, called him Steve in the future. It was Captain America or it was Cap or in Tony’s case, it was a lot of increasingly unfunny icicle puns. 

“Sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t exactly...get out much.”

“Too different?”

Steve shrugged. “Something like that.”

“Bucky,” the man said, offering his hand.

“Steve,” Steve said, before a flush crept up his neck. “Well, I guess you knew that.”

Bucky chuckled. “Yeah, I kind of did.” 

Silence fell between them before Bucky spoke again. “My appointment is in like forty minutes or something. Even then they’re probably not going to be on time. Doctors never are. How about you?”

“Forty-five, I think.”

Bucky grinned. “You want to go down the hall and get some coffee?”

Steve gestured to the packet of forms in Bucky’s hand. “Don’t you have to fill those out?”

“No reason I can’t fill them out while we have some coffee.”

Steve looked over at the receptionist, who was on the phone and looking down at her computer, briefly wondering if they would get in trouble for leaving and then realizing that he really didn’t care if he did. “Okay, yeah, sure.”

Bucky smiled, and Steve felt way too happy and warm about someone that he’d just met thirty seconds ago.

Bucky led him down the hall to a little cafe, ordering a vanilla latte and a cinnamon bun with the kind of easy familiarity that made Steve wonder if he’d been here a lot--a thought that only got more persistent when Bucky took his latte and pastry and made a beeline to a little formica table in a corner and started making his way through the stack of forms.

His gut clenched, and he turned to the cashier. “Can I cover what he bought too?” The cashier shrugged and nodded, adding Bucky’s order to Steve’s.

As he walked back to the little table where Bucky had sat down, he was doing his best not to look directly at Bucky’s arm and at the star.

“You want to ask, so, go ahead. I don’t mind,” Bucky said, looking up at him from the forms. His gaze was piercing and made Steve feel a little weak in the knees.

He pursed his lips. Even though Bucky was giving him permission to ask about his arm, he couldn’t stop his heart from thrumming wildly in his chest. “Sorry. Uh...how did it happen?” 

“Afghanistan. Third tour,” Bucky shrugged. “My brain is...kind of fuzzy on some of the details, but the gist is, Hydra was operating out of some shithole in Kabul. They shot me up with the stuff they gave you. Tried to make me into some kind of robot assassin.” 

Steve furrowed his brow at the mention of Hydra. The name of the organization still made his blood boil, even though Natasha had told him that they were pretty much obsolete now, limited to a couple of radicalized nutjobs. What happened to Bucky, though, sounded like a little bit more than a couple of radicalized nutjobs. “I’m sorry.”

Bucky waved a hand. “It’s fine. I’ve made my peace with it. It’s not like it actually worked. They basically just pumped me full of drugs until I was a drooling idiot. I couldn’t stand up, much less shoot a gun at anyone. According to some files the U.S. military recovered, which I guess technically I’m not supposed to know,” Bucky rolled his eyes, “My arm--which is where my soulmark was--was removed as a way to better ensure that I would be under their control. Can’t have your robot assassin running off with his soulmate.” 

Steve had practically turned green, nauseated with guilt. While, intellectually, he knew that he hadn’t done anything to Bucky, it was hard for him to not feel as though he was the one who had kidnapped him and tried to get the serum to take. “Is that why you joined the study?” 

Bucky shrugged again. “Way to get out of my head, I guess. I’ve been staying with my sister and her husband in Queens. She says that I can stay as long as I want, but I don’t want her to have to deal with me for that long.” He let out a weak, sarcastic laugh that made Steve’s gut clench. “Christ, what I wouldn’t do for a smoke.”

“Those things aren’t good for you,” Steve said, feeling a little grateful for a change in subject. Bucky snorted.

“Christ, I know. Some asshole dressed like Captain America came to my school when I was in the fifth grade and told us smoking was bad for us. Guess they didn’t count on the whole ‘being kidnapped by actual supervillains thing’.”

“Careful,” Steve said, a little grin forming on his features. “You are talking to some asshole who dresses like Captain America.”

Bucky laughed, and Steve’s grin grew a little wider.

“So why are you in the study, then? You trying to find Mrs. Captain America?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow and picking at his cinnamon bun.

Steve shrugged. “Or...uh...Mr. Captain America,” he said softly, “Though I never really believed that strongly in marriage as an institution. As a partnership for two people in love, sure, but as an institution, no.” 

Bucky’s eyes widened. “You’re--” he started, before Steve just smiled a little and nodded.

Bucky let out an amused sigh and shook his head. “You know, in school we did a whole play about you? I played Captain America one year and got to make out with this girl...God what was her name...Kayla McAllister I want to say. She played Peggy Carter. Everyone knows you too were soulmates. The play did not mention you were...”

“Bisexual,” Steve supplied, making a mental note to google this play and put it on his list of Things to Be Mad About. 

“Yeah,” Bucky mused. “Who saw that coming?”

“More than a few guys back in the 1930s.”

“...did Captain America just try to make a dirty joke?”

“He didn’t try to make a dirty joke, he _made_ a dirty joke.”

Bucky rolled his eyes, but was smiling still. “Sure, sure.”

And it was in that moment that Steve’s guilt reared its head yet again. He frowned and flexed his fingers around his cup. “I feel like I should tell you something.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“Your uh...your star there,” Steve gulped. “It matches the one...on my chest.”

For a moment, Bucky’s expression was neutral--unreadable. Steve was pretty certain that Bucky was about to tell him off for having a coffee with him, maybe call him manipulative, or tell him that he never wanted to see him again.

Instead, Bucky’s grin grew large and he belted out a laugh. “Oh my God, are you serious?”

“Deadly serious,” Steve nodded. 

There was a mischievous glint in Bucky’s eyes. “Can I see it?”

And because Steve, as it happened, had always been helpless when it came to gorgeous, flirtatious men, ended up being incredibly late to his appointment, because upon seeing the star on Steve's chest in the men’s bathroom down the hall, Bucky had dropped to his knees and sucked his dick so enthusiastically Steve swore that he had gotten a little light-headed when he came.

When his appointment was over, he was disappointed to see that Bucky wasn't in the waiting room. That was, until the receptionist waved him over and slid him a piece of paper. "Your friend had to go but he left you a note." 

Steve couldn't stop smiling when he saw it was Bucky's number.

**Author's Note:**

> Mirror Image  
> Creator(s): plutosrose  
> Card number: 012  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29141817  
> Square filled: E2, Soulmark  
> Rating: M  
> Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  
> Major tags: Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Soulmarks, Medical Study, Past Non-Consensual Body Modification
> 
> Summary:
> 
> Steve joins a medical study after he tells Dr. Cho his soulmark changed, and meets Bucky Barnes, who had his soulmark removed by Hydra.
> 
> Word count: 3,190


End file.
